My motivation for changing my diet this time is to make my skin better.

Since I completely moved to Spain last September, my skin has started to get pimples. This makes me unhappy that I don't like acne on weekdays, and I insist on blaming my "acclimatization" on the hard water quality in Europe. So I spent almost half a year trying various natural methods to fight these "unaccustomed acne"!

Install a soft water treatment filter at home; Apply tea tree essence to acne area; Switch to various European and American acne facial cleanser brands with good acne reputation; Try all kinds of private acne cases on Ins, such as baking soda washing face, coffee and honey mask, turmeric powder exfoliating and even regular bowel washing. ......

Don't expect too much from the above methods, although some methods do have other surprises (I will write a separate article after this). But for my acne, they really didn't achieve my expected effect.

So I began to analyze the changes in diet.

Still don't touch meat or milk, why do you get acne inexplicably? Is it a compliment to breakfast, pizza, pasta and fruit, chocolate and carrot cake in western food?

Before that, I wrote an article about ketogenesis. I explained clearly in that article what a ketogenic diet is and how to mix it until it enters a ketogenic state.

But at the end of the article, I also confessed my worries about this high-fat and low-carbon diet in flexitarian, worrying that the list of foods I can eat is too limited to make ketone bodies rise successfully. This is probably the reason why I didn't try.

With the mentality that a dead horse is a living horse doctor, I decided to spend a month on a complete and strict ketogenic diet! In this month, I insisted on cooking meals that meet the requirements of ketogenesis, and began to measure the number of ketone bodies in urine with test paper from the second week to ensure that I was always in a state of successful ketogenesis. Miraculously, it was from the second week of ketogenic diet that my skin completely stopped appearing new closed mouth, and the old closed mouth quickly dried up and disappeared. Since the third week, my skin condition has almost returned to its previous peak!

But the most famous effect of ketogenic diet is to lose weight. Because in the ketogenic diet, not only can you not touch sugar and sugary foods at all, but all free sugar such as honey and fruit juice; Rice, noodles, bread and all other staple foods. Corn, oats, black beans and other miscellaneous grains. ; Even all starchy vegetables such as potatoes, sweet potatoes and pumpkins can't be touched. Because the ketogenic diet needs to reduce the intake of carbohydrates to 5% of the daily intake, the only lost indicators must be reserved for low-carbon ketogenic friendly vegetables and various low-carbon nuts, such as spinach, zucchini, eggplant, broccoli and tomatoes.

Ketogenic diet needs to make the body reach two states:

1. Prevent carbohydrates from being converted into fat in the body.

2. Let the body's metabolic mode change from glycogen metabolism to fat metabolism.

This means preventing new fat from gaining, while burning old fat. Not thin! Therefore, the ketogenic diet is the way to get through fat metabolism, so that eating fat is no longer the devil who can't get in, but the role of fuel is used by the body.

The order of body energy consumption is-> glycogen consumption; Consume fat-> consume protein. Carbohydrate is an important intake of glycogen and an important part of our diet. Therefore, many people think that eating staple food has strength, which is actually reasonable. But the fastest way to accumulate fat is actually that after eating too much carbohydrate food, carbohydrates are not completely converted into glycogen for metabolism, so they are converted into fat through the liver and stored.

Only by eating less carbohydrates will you have no glycogen with incomplete metabolism, and there will be no excess fat in your body.

But if you skip the process of consuming glycogen and digest fat directly, can you? Theoretically, it can be achieved, just to achieve the purpose of improving fat consumption! So how do you consume fat? That is to completely reduce the intake of glycogen. When the body's glycogen is completely consumed, the second consumption mode naturally starts!

Therefore, the ketogenic diet is very tempting for people who want to lose weight! But the way I used to consume fat was to exercise more and eat less fat. Although it is much harder than the simple and rude fat metabolism of ketogenesis, my body fat is well controlled. So losing weight is not the purpose of my ketogenesis this time. To tell the truth, I didn't lose weight for 30 days, but my body fat was obviously reduced.

As for why this ketogenic is so helpful to my skin? I checked more foreign literature about the relationship between ketogenesis and dermatitis rash, and found that ketogenesis opens up fat metabolism, which is not only very helpful for burning fat, but also the problem of fat particles or greasy clogging pores will be solved because of the opening of fat metabolism channels! Then a high-sugar diet will increase insulin secretion, which will cause skin inflammation when human hormones are secreted vigorously. Although I don't eat meat or drink milk, my intake of grain, starch and sugar is obviously higher than that in China, that is, a high GI and high carbon diet.

There are four main hormones in skin inflammation, which can stimulate the increase of oily sebum, make specific skin cells grow excessively, and lead to excessive sebum secretion and pore blockage:

dihydrotestosterone

Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA)

somatotropin

Insulin-like growth factor (IGF- 1)

The long-term increase of insulin caused by high GI and high sugar diet will unbalance these hormones. By reducing carbohydrate intake, we can quickly balance insulin, and then reduce IGF- 1, so as to balance androgen and other hormones, prevent excessive sebum secretion, and let skin cells grow normally. Of course, the reality is cruel. Once the high-carbon water diet is restored, acne will appear again!

Someone also asked me, "Yan Ni, why did you eat sugar and carbohydrates before, so that you wouldn't get fat and your skin wouldn't be bad?" Is it because you are old and have metabolic problems, so you have to quit sugar and carbohydrates to become thin and beautiful? "

In fact, eating a high-sugar diet for a long time will ruin our health. In the past, our body had insulin to help us lower blood sugar, so we wouldn't get fat and greasy so easily. But when there is a state called "insulin resistance" in the body, sugar and carbohydrates can easily destroy our body and skin.

So what exactly is insulin resistance?

How to eat ketogenic meal?

I decided to tell you next time!